Student Submission CUNY Hunter College Spring 2025

A former professional football player by the name of Shannon Sharpe, engaged in an argument with Twitter netizens regarding the WNBA ending in a misogynistic clap back to a woman who appears to be Black. The original input by the user @ungodlywests who is the Black woman that faced this unsuspecting backlash was a short comment of “oh i’m sure you don’t” (9/25/2024, Twitter) in response to Sharpe defending himself against OP (original poster) confronting his perspective of WNBA players. What @ungodlywests received in return was misogynoir in the form of an insult from Sharpe and a few other users online. The discussion of Black women wearing ‘horse hair’ in a negative connotation is something that has been brought up to belittle black women. We face discrimination with our natural hair being seen as unkept, not clean, or unprofessional at times in society. Using things like kanekalon or wigs is partially a way to avert ourselves from the idea that our natural hair is unkempt. At a certain point when people caught wind of Black women using alternative hairstyles to fit into the larger system, some people used calling the hair that we use as horse hair, regardless of if the hair was actually sourced from horses,  as just another way to put us down and keep us within that negative image. This insult of “Don’t you have another horse 2 rob of his hair” coming from a Black man with a huge platform and at the time @ungoldlywests’s profile picture possibly being Megan the Stallion adds another layer to the misogynistic feeling from that argument. There was no need to come after their hair when you could visibly see an extremely popular Black woman on their profile. There really couldn’t have been any other motive other than being anti-black and hateful.